Soy Pública

Image by our sister collective: DIWO-Coop

Soy Pública is a collective created in 2010 as a response to attacks on public education in the Greater Madrid area. It’s a totally independent group based on assembly principles. Their mission: to keep public education apart from market logic, free of political party interests, and geared towards knowledge, solidarity, and human emancipation to guarantee a democratic society.

As they say: “We’re not interested in the same old tired theories on the deterioration of public education, told time and time again which, in many cases, hide the intention of fostering a climate contrary to it. We’ve carried out a thorough investigation of the causes underlying this phenomenon, filtering it through our analysis of current world events.

What we’ve learned is that every single one of these attacks on public education carries forth the intention of the submittance of mass education to the neoliberal paradigm, given that the degradation is deliberate, and caters to the need for easily governed individuals who’re incapable of understanding the world they live in. With this in mind, we strive to create an alternative discourse, which is able to take on the current challenges while providing new perspectives with which to clarify and determine the true nature of the conflict in education, not only in Madrid and Spain, but internationally.”

Soy Pública’s activity is focused on three main axes:

Investigating the causes, consequences and relative mechanisms of the dismantling and privatization of public education systems

Sharing contrasting information and the results of their investigation through their blog and Social Media channels

Building a powerful movement capable of turning back the attack on public education

Soy Pública wants to make people consciously aware of public education; an education which, in their words: “is both critical and constructive, so we can reclaim the principles of equality, love of knowledge, freedom of expression, and thought. We’re aware that the current system is anything but favourable towards our goals, but history has taught us that social rights and liberty are not given away freely, they are conquered. We want to be clear: we will remain steadfast in our fight and we’ll do all we can to create an emancipatory education to build a better world”.

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“To immunize ourselves from learned helplessness, the best thing is to have encountered neither success nor failure exclusively. Be conscious that there are things which we can control, and things which we cannot. As Epicurus remarked: “We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that neither must we count upon it as quite certain to come nor despair of it as quite certain not to come…”